Traditional information retrieval systems based on the "bag-of-words" paradigm can-not completely capture the semantic content of documents. Yet it is impossible with
current technology to build a practical information access system that fully ana-
lyzes and understands unrestricted natural language. However, if we avoid the most
complex and processing-intensive natural language understanding techniques, we can
construct a large-scale information access system which is capable of processing unre-
stricted text, largely understanding it, and answering natural language queries with
high precision. We believe that ternary expressions are the most suitable representa-
tional structure for such a system; they are expressive enough for information retrieval
purposes, yet amenable to rapid large-scale indexing.